Projects fail in droves. Systems hiccup and hours of downtime follows. Screws fall out all the time; the world is an imperfect place.

We talk a lot about building resilient systems, but all systems are (at least for now) built by humans. Humans who have been making the same types of mistakes for thousands of years.

Just because failure happens doesn’t mean we can’t do our best to prevent it or—at the very least—to minimize the damage when it does. As a matter of fact, embracing failure can be one of the best things you do for your system. Failure is a vital part of evolution. By learning to love failure we learn how to take the next step forward. Ignoring or punishing failure leads to stagnation and wasted potential.

This talk distills over 3000 pages of failure research into 40 minutes of knowledge about the human factors of failure, how it can be recognised, and how you can work around it to create more resilient systems.

By the end of this talk the audience will have an awareness of the most common psychological reasons for mistakes and failures and how to develop systems and processes to protect against them.